SATA Drives & WinXP - any FAQs'/Guides around

[Bill L]

Hello all

Eventually I'll probably want to start using the SATA connectors on My
Gigabyte mobo (maybe just for curiosities sake). Are there any good, simply
written guides for setting up SATA drives with XP.

If someone can point me to one that recommends how to transfer an existing
install of WinXP to a SATA drive that'd be very useful.

TIA

BillL

 

[Bob Harris]

I do not know of a "guide", but having performed a clean installed XP on a
Seagate SATA hard disk I can tell you that it is absolutely required to have
the right windows drivers for the motherboard available on a floppy (CD will
not work) early in the installation process. Further, the window of
oppertunity to hit F6 and install these is very small and can easily be
missed. No real harm if missed, the XP installer will simple not see the
drive and if it is the only drive, refuse to continue with an obvious
message.

In your case, I understand that you want to transfer an existing XP setup
from an IDE drive to a SATA drive. That may be trickier. I suspect that
you will be required to perform a "repair" installation of XP, at which
point it will ask for the drivers.

One other area to explore before using SATA. on some motherboards the SATA
is actually on a RAID controller. That is the case with my ASUS P4S8X. If
a RAID controller, you need to create a RAID array before using the disk.
An "array" can contain a single disk, but the defualt is more likely to
stripe two disks together. Since each motherboard is different, read the
manual, at least twice.

Finally, some backup programs do not do SATA and/or RAID, or only partially.
Norton GHOST 2003 works in DOS mode, but not in windows mode. GHOST 2002
also works in DOS mode. Acronis TrueImage does not work to restore (from
LINUX floppy or CDit creates for you), although it can create an image in
its windows mode. According to Powerquest support, DriveImage won't work
either.

 

[Bob]

Hi Bob,

I recently have tried installing Xp Pro on my intel
system with a maxtor 160 Gb SATA drive and I booted
the CD, installed the SATA config files, installed
the base OS files off the CD but when the system
rebooted, it saw the disk but printed the message:
"Operating System not found".

If I try to boot the CD again, it see the NTFS partition
on the SATA disk but wants to "Re-install" all over
again.

What am I doing wrog here? Is there some file I'm
missing?

I'm SURE I've configured the SATA drive corectly:
as base ATA not RAID (It shows this in BIOS (ver 1.06).

Any thoughts? Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Bob.